Your fitness tracker is supposed to count your steps in a day, measure how many calories you¡¯ve burned, and your cardiovascular health. So why on earth is it detecting a heartbeat from a toilet paper roll? Well, that¡¯s exactly what Chinese Internet users are discovering.
Abacus/YouTube
According to Chinese tech site Abacus, people in the country have taken the trend viral lately after someone discovered the Xiaomi Mi Band 3 displaying a heart rate when wrapped around a toilet roll. Local social media platform Weibo has since been flooded with others trying it out on various cylindrical objects like bottles, cans, stuffed animal limbs. And it worked every time!!
It¡¯s not just a glitch on the Mi Band either; apparently, the phenomenon has been confirmed with others too, including the very expensive Apple Watch Series 4. Meanwhile, different objects seem to register different phantom hear rates. While toilet rolls show a heart rate of 81 BPM, a banana registers 77 BPM, and a coffee mug 72 BPM. So, what gives?
Well, the explanation lies in how these heart monitoring smartwatches are designed. Smartwatches shine a green light on your wrist when worn. Blood absorbs green light, meaning that the absorption is faster when when your heart rate increases. Photoplethysmography (PPG), as it¡¯s called, is the easiest way to measure how fast your heart is beating.
The thing is, some objects can reflect light shone on them, thereby confusing the sensors on these smartwatches. Bananas, and coffee mugs for instance are more reflective than toilet paper. As such, they provide a phantom rate rate via PPG more consistently. However, in each case, some amount of the light is getting absorbed, which is what indicates a fake heart rate.
It¡¯s not a flaw in the smartwatches themselves, after all they measure human heart beats just fine. That is what they were designed for, it¡¯s just that they have an unintentionally comical side effect. It certainly doesn¡¯t mean your toilet paper is really alive and hates what you put it through. *shiver*